In the mountains north and east of Mexico City, hacendados held some
blocks of land. Some other lands there were open to new claimants.
Among the people who moved in were some whole Indians communities, and
some non-Indian families who established ranches to grow sugar or coffee.
These rancheros were not large-scale operators. In time, they would
have their own quarrels with the hacendados. Neither were they poor
and miserable.

This seizing of opportunity, this filling-in of settlement patterns,
appeared in many parts of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, during
the first part of the 19th century.

Everywhere that there were great landholders and merchants, there were
likely to be small operators too, and also some poor people who had little
or no land, no capital -- but who did not belong to any non-criollo community.
These levels of society were not rigid estates or castes, even if great
wealth had ways to preserve itself, and great poverty had little chance
to gain anything. Almost everywhere, the power of planters and hacendados
was modulated by movement from below, or from outside..

There were various ways that lesser men could build up their positions.

One way was for the farmer to look around, pick up bits and pieces of neighboring
land that became available, maybe even move off to a next valley where
people were selling off.

Another was to offer a service to neighbors: transportation.
Mule-trains or river-boats could turn the isolated farmer into a trader
with the outside world. The active mule-driver or pilot could build up
a local service network, at the same time acquiring his own herds and vessels.

The outcome could work either way, when it came to social conflict.
The uneducated mule-driver could be written off as a clod of the people,
no matter how high he rose, and could keep some loyalty to the communities
from whose ground he came. Witness Vicente Guerrero

Or the ill-educated ferry-captain could sail all the way up to the ranks
of the power-brokers, demonstrating the most that "mobility" could accomplish.
Witness Cornelius Vanderbilt.

At the time when Guerrero was expanding from mule-driver to
insurgent military leader, Vanderbilt (not yet 20) was operating his first
ferry service between Staten Island and New York. At the time
that Guerrero made his alliance with Iturbide, in the Plan de Iguala, Vanderbilt
was building up a new and expanded ferry business. When Guerrero
became President of Mexico, Vanderbilt was expanding into a steamship line
on the Hudson River. But Vanderbilt never met a firing squad.
He went on, in later years, to operate shipping to California by way of
Central America, then railroads between New York and Chicago.

These were spectacular examples. They showed how "social mobility"
picked up people at a point of transition between grounded networks and
control networks.

Some people picked up land enough, or business enough, that they could
accept the control networks as something that worked to their own benefit.
In Mexico, some were individual Indians who cut loose from obligations
to traditional communities. Many were mestizos who moved into some
area where they found available land, and could set up as small rancheros.
In the United States, most were just farmers, and most of these owning
no slaves, in whatever section.

In any part of the continent, the process of drawing people off, from
community into control, was one way that the control networks remained
flexible and vigorous.

In any array of middling landholders, a few could emerge as men of
some social power. These middling leaders were in a position to mediate
between planters and farmers, rationalizing the authority of the one and
representing the interests of the other. Of course, middling leaders
disagreed among each other about how to work this strategy of mediation.

Landholders varied in how close they were to the centers of social power.
This was paralleled by a variation in how much any leader identified with
his national army, on the one hand, or with local militias on the other.
Military "honor" and ambition being what they are, officers could easily
quarrel, and sometimes mobilize rival forces against each other.
In the day-to-day working of political conflict, there was rarely any clear
line to be drawn between conflict over levels of military authority and
conflict between levels of social mediation. But, if there had been
no competition for social and economic power, and no role to be played
by the social mediators, no quarrel among officers could have moved much
beyond a barracks revolt -- not even in Mexico.

Without the gradation and mediation, it would have been plausible to
argue that there was little to choose between Mexico and the U.S. South.
One had white planters resisting the community needs of black slaves.
The other had white hacendados resisting the community needs of pobres
indios. It was common for U.S. soldiers, entering Mexico with
the invasion of 1847, to say that "your peons" are just like "our slaves."

The difference operated, rather, in what happened at the lower end of
the scale.

In the United States, mediation stopped abruptly at the level of poor,
nonslaveholding whites. When Native American groups built communities
in which their own leaders became property-holders who could claim a mediating
role, these communities were simply removed from the scene, in order to
make room for white settlers who had their own leaders. The Indian
Removal Law of 1830 was only one act in this process. And there was
no group within the political classes whose position made it natural for
them to represent the interests of African Americans. The fate of
John Brown, in the 1850s, underlined that point.

In Mexico, on the other hand, active leaders varied all the way from
Lucas Alamán, at the most conservative, to Vicente Guerrero at the
apparently most popular. Though Guerrero was removed from the Presidency
in 1830, and later executed, he had after all occupied the office of President.

Guerrero left behind him a range of regional leaders who mediated, either

between his radicalism and some next level of landholder populism (as did
Juan Álvarez), or

between that older populism and some next level of landholder moderation
(as did Nicolás Bravo), or

between that moderation and some next level of landholder conservatism
(as did Luis de Cortázar).

Individuals shifted back and forth between levels -- some in obvious consternation
and embarrassment (Álvarez), some with Machiavellian effectiveness
(Cortázar). It was not just that a Santa Anna mediated among
all these leaders in a spectacularly crass way. It was that the whole
mediation process had the leaders arrayed on a scale ahead of time, ready
for him to manipulate.

The comparable leaders in the United States, though they formed a similar
scale from populist to conservative, were restricted much more to a standard
white population. There was hardly anyone like Álvarez, and nobody
like Guerrero.

This enormous difference aside, the political classes in all countries
were marked by an elaborate scale downward from the greatest property-owners
through the most modest rancheros and farmers. Mobility and in-fighting,
within this scale, was one of the ways by which societies kept from developing
into rigid systems of explosive pressure. But that in-fighting was
limited in its social reach, and ultimately ineffective in letting off
all steam. Catastrophe was being prepared.